Cycling through the ‘hidden heartlands’ of this wondrous island…

July is the month I take a break from political commentary and go cycling around Ireland. Two years ago – with my friend David Ward – I cycled from Mizen Head in west Cork to Fair Head in north Antrim. In contrast, this year we decided to cycle from north-west to south-east: from Derry city to Rosslare in Wexford.

That involved putting the bicycles on the train to Belfast and Derry and back from Rosslare. I have often wondered why we have met so few other cycle tourists in our midsummer perambulations around the island (just one other couple this year). One of the reasons must be the extraordinary lack of provision for bicycles on Irish Rail trains. There was a time when at least on the trains between the three main cities – Dublin, Belfast and Cork – there were guards vans, and therefore plenty of room for bikes. Now every train has precisely two clumsy racks for bikes in one single passenger car. I had booked those racks for our trip back in April, the full allowable three months in advance. I wonder how many disappointed foreign cycle tourists have discovered there was no possibility of bringing their bikes on Irish trains this summer. I have tried in vain to book myself and my two cycling daughters onto trains. It’s a crazy, self-defeating system at a time when sustainable tourism is all the rage.

So David and I set off from Derry on 1st July. The first two significant places we passed were a contrast in national and sectarian styles. Newbuildings is a loyalist village: Orange flags and First World War memorials abound, with every small settlement seeming to sport a cricket ground. Strabane is a strongly nationalist town (although it too has a cricket club), with Sinn Fein’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill canvassing in the main street, surrounded by a group of adoring women, and republican hunger strike memorials in the Catholic housing estates.

The cricketing theme continued in the tree-lined, former industrial village of Sion Mills, just south of Strabane. Here, in July 1969 – in the last piece of good news before Northern Ireland descended into 30 years of violence – Ireland caused one the biggest upsets in late 20th century cricket by defeating a powerful West Indian side, bowling them out on a soggy pitch for an astonishing 25 runs.

We spent the first night in Omagh, watching Orange bands march through the streets as part of the Battle of the Somme commemorations. If you take away the anti-Catholicism, there is great colour and pageantry in these band parades, not to mention musical virtuosity. In a united Ireland we are going to have to find some way of making them acceptable, even enjoyable, to the great majority of people in the present-day republic who are implacably hostile to the Orange Order.

The following morning we cycled through Fintona, a classically divided Northern Irish village, with a big, modern gospel hall at one end of the main street, and a splendid GAA complex at the other. In the middle is a pub, The Poet’s Bar: one can only hope that members of the two communities occasionally come together here under the benign eye of John Montague, one of Ireland’s finest late 20th century poets, who was raised in nearby Garvaghey.

In Lisnaskea in Fermanagh, we had a tasty lunch in the charming Cherry Tree bakery, one of those remarkable home bakeries for which Northern Ireland deserves to be better known. Isabel Charles and her husband Norman converted a badly rundown building into this bakery and cafe, opening it in June 1970, just as nearly 30 years of darkness descended on the North. These are the kind of unheralded, extremely hardworking people who kept open the lines of civility and prosperity during the worst of times.

Then it was across the border into Cavan. Cavan town gives the impression of being an unusually industrious and thriving place. Whether it’s big multinationals like Liberty Insurance, St Gobain or Abbott, or smaller local enterprises in everything from data analytics to cider making, digitisation in construction to homemade chocolates, this unfashionable town is a place of enterprise and entrepreneurship. And it shows in the lines of plutocratic five and six bedroomed houses on many of the roads out of the town.

The next stop was Loughcrew in north Meath. This extraordinary passage tomb on a hill is estimated to be 5,200 years old, 2,000 years older than nearby Newgrange and older again than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. As sun and showers swept across the countryside, leaving a brilliant lucidity in the sky, I was able to see the whole central plain of Ireland and the mountains that ring it: the Cooleys, the Mournes, Slieve Gullion, the Slieve Blooms, Cuilcagh on the Fermanagh-Cavan border and the mountains of Sligo and Leitrim. Here for more than five millenia people have been celebrating their ancestors, their gods and nature. It is a truly humbling experience to stand on its small summit and think about the countless ancestors who have stood here before me and contemplated this celestial view.

We crossed Westmeath in bright sunshine. One of my glimpses of heaven on earth (I have others) is to be cycling through the hayfields and meadows of Ireland’s rich agricultural counties under blue skies and scudding clouds with the smell of silage in my nostrils. Then it was along the banks of the Royal Canal, past young canoeists learning the ropes at Longwood and the engineering marvel that is the Boyne Aqueduct, built in 1795 to bring the canal over the Boyne river.

From canal to canal: west of Naas is a very picturesque and little-known wooded stretch of the Grand Canal, complete with cafes and coffee kiosks, which lands one conveniently in that town’s main thoroughfare through the short Basin Street. We spent that night in the hospitable company of my astronomer and adventurer friend John Butler, late of Armagh Observatory, who spends much of his time now in his converted farmhouse outside Hollywood, with superb views of the Wicklow Mountains.

We skirted those mountains through Baltinglass, Tullow and Bunclody to make Enniscorthy our final overnight stop, breaking for lunch in the Green Lemon café in the pretty village of Rathvilly (home place of Kevin Barry, the 18 year old Irish Volunteer and medical student executed by the British in the War of Independence). I have written before of my wonder at the excellent cafés in so many small places these days, one of the most pleasurable aspects of the arrival of prosperity in Ireland. Two more on this journey were the Limetree coffee shop at Loughcrew and the Sugar and Spice café in Bunclody. As a longtime café lover, I cannot recommend these pleasing establishments highly enough.

We ended our six-day journey at Rosslare Strand in County Wexford with a moment of happiness as I posed with my bicycle on the beach for a photo taken by a group of friendly women from Carlow. This was a journey through part of what Tourism Ireland has dubbed the ‘Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands’ (with a bit of ‘Ireland’s Ancient East’ thrown in): effectively the Shannon basin and the midlands, because due to the Northern Ireland Tourist Board’s idiotic reluctance to get involved in Tourism Ireland’s highly regarded international campaigns, it has to stop at the border.

The ‘Hidden Heartlands’ campaign has never really taken off, unlike Tourism Ireland’s spectacularly successful ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ along the west coast. As I was cycling our 450 kilometre route through the heart of the island, I was mulling over what one might be able to sell to overseas tourists in the 10 counties we passed through. There are plenty of fine attractions in these relatively unfashionable and unvisited regions, some of which we experienced on this trip. Here is an indicative list: Derry’s walls; Tyrone’s Orange band parades (they do good republican parades too, if that is more your bag); the lakes of Fermanagh; the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ steps up Cuilcagh mountain on the Cavan border; the passage grave at Loughcrew; the 18th century folly that is Belvedere House in Westmeath; the Curragh of Kildare; the Wicklow Mountains; the Borris Festival of Writing and Ideas (with some of the world’s leading novelists, historians and journalists) in Carlow and the marvellous beaches of Wexford. Ireland is a uniquely beautiful and fascinating island, and the often overlooked Irish midlands are part of that fascination.

PS (1) One can’t get away from politics completely, even in midsummer. I was struck by the shameless populism of Sinn Fein who – six weeks after their poor performance in the European and local elections (partly attributable to their previously generous stance on housing asylum seekers) – produced a policy paper which basically advocated moving the accommodation of asylum seekers from working class to middle class areas. I live in the middle-class area of Rathmines/Ranelagh in south Dublin, where we have four buildings owned by property developers and a hotel housing several hundred asylum seekers. And there has been no trouble. Praise is due, in particular, for the small group of brilliant people in the area – most of them women – who have single-handedly supported the homeless asylum seekers for whom there is no accommodation, and whom the authorities cruelly keep moving along and erecting high fences to keep them and their tents out of small green areas. One can only imagine the exhaustion, fear and hopelessness of these young men from poor and war-torn countries.

PS (2) Congratulations to Armagh on beating Galway to win the All-Ireland football championship. I lived for 14 years in Armagh city when running the Centre for Cross Border Studies, and have a very soft spot for the place. I’m particularly glad for manager Kieran McGeeney, whose determination and refusal to say die during the bad times over the past 10 years are worthy of real admiration.

Andy Pollak retired as founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in July 2013 after 14 years. He is a former religious affairs correspondent, education correspondent, assistant news editor and Belfast reporter with the Irish Times.